When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
CLAUDETTE COLVINAs long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so many others gave their lives and didn’t get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.
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The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn’t like themselves.
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.
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We were churchgoing people.
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When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.
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I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.
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I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.
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I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.
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A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.
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There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.
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I never swore when I was young.
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I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
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That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.
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